Google is hiring a new chief who they hope will make a difference in the beleaguered Google Pay division. Bloomberg reports that Arnold Goldberg, PayPal’s chief product architect, will now lead Google Pay after former payments chief Caesar Sengupta left in April.
This new app was originally developed and is very different from the old Google Pay app used in the US. First, the new app switched to using a phone number for identification instead of a Google account, which meant that a lot of the features US users were used to were no longer supported. Consumers are accustomed to identifying a phone number thanks to apps like WhatsApp and the restrictions don’t matter much to users in this country as smartphones are the only device many consumers have.
However, for Google Pay in the US, the use of a SIM for identification meant that the functionality of the Google Pay website had to die, the multi-device functionality was gone, and Google Pay went from supporting multiple accounts to supporting just one account. As we wrote shortly after launch, the new app was a disaster.
A month after the big US launch, Sengupta left Google, leaving Google Pay users in the US with in-app clutter and major feature regressions. Google Pay’s global user base was still split between old and new apps, and the division’s future, including already announced plans to launch a Google “Plex”bank account, was now in doubt.
An August report by Business Insider said that Sengupta’s departure marked the beginning of a massive exodus from the division, with “dozens”of employees and executives leaving, including “seven leaders on the team with director or VP roles”and “half the people working on the team.”for business development”.
By October, the division felt completely out of control, with reports circulating that Google’s plans to launch consumer bank accounts were dead. Google has already promoted the service in several blog posts and 400,000 people have signed up on the waiting list to get an account.
This BI report quoted one former employee as saying that “Caesar [Sengupta’s] departure was the cornerstone of intense employee frustration. The product didn’t grow as fast as we wanted.”We can get specific numbers for one of Google Pay’s core features – NFC payments – to support the notion that growth isn’t fast enough. pulse, the Maps division of Discover, puts Google at 3 percent of the US NFC payments market, while Apple dominates the market with 92 percent. Google was the first major tech company to get into NFC payments, starting with the Galaxy Nexus in 2011. That was three years before the launch of Apple Pay, but mismanaged by an endless series of reboots and rebrands, and Android’s subjugation to the whims of carriers, Google is now in last place. It’s embarrassing.
Restarting Google Pay
Despite just canceled plans to open a Google bank account, Google’s chief commercial officer (and another former PayPal employee) Bill Ready now tells Bloomberg, “We’re not a bank – we have no intention of being a bank.”The Bloomberg report goes on to say that “as part of the overhaul, Google will focus more on becoming a ‘comprehensive digital wallet’ that includes digital tickets, airline tickets and vaccine passports.”This sentence actually says very little because tickets and COVID cards are current features of Google Pay.
One new thing that Google has mentioned is possible support for cryptocurrencies. Ready told Bloomberg: “Cryptocurrency is something we pay a lot of attention to. As user and merchant demand evolves, we will evolve with it.” Google is currently partnering with Coinbase and BitPay to store cards, but does not accept crypto for transactions.
The report mentions a lot of new people in high positions in Google Pay, so we hope that this will lead to a more dramatic turnaround than what is described in the article. It’s silly to suggest this, but the service would be better if 2021 never happened. Can we just bring back the old app and website?